


isaiah 14:19

by orphan_account



Category: Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: Ending B, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-26 02:11:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3833125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>after michael's death, they find comfort in each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	isaiah 14:19

**Author's Note:**

> _"But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to the stones of the pit; as a carcase trodden under feet."_ \--Isaiah 14:19

The funeral is harder than Amanda thought it would be. Every inch of Michael’s death is a battle. Michael was baptized and confirmed, of course, like a good Irish boy ought to be, but it's been years since his last confession. He dies in a state of mortal sin. The Rockford Hills Church hadn’t wanted to take him, but Lester quietly does something that makes the problems go away, for which she is grateful. They are allowed to put him in the hallowed earth there and pray for his soul. 

She doesn’t expect to feel the very weight of the chapel, to feel the burning heat of the candles lit at the altars to Mary, to feel like there is something aching and huge in the center of her chest, waiting to tear her to shreds. Her clothes feel like layers of melting wax. The black film across her eyes is a lace veil Tracey pinned into her hair, a mantilla like her grandmother used to wear. She’s a widow now.

Michael is pale and still, and you almost can’t tell that the back of his head is caved in from the impact if you don’t look too hard at him. Somehow, him looking so peaceful only makes it worse. Her husband, the man she loves, is not here. Not in this body, in this church, in this world. 

She is exhausted. Everything feels like it weighs a hundred pounds—her eyes, her clothes, her very breathing is an effort. It was supposed to be easier than this.

Trevor surprises her. She sees him and startles, somehow still thinking of him as a ghost even though he has been back in her periphery for months, now. He sits himself next to her, and though both Jimmy and Tracey try to quietly redirect him, she doesn’t mind his company here. She can’t stand being so lonely. 

He wasn’t at the vigil, where she had held back tears and said her rosary like she was fifteen again, holding beads long forgotten but prayers always on the tip of her tongue. It makes her dizzy. It has been a long, long time since she has been happy to see Trevor, but something about him being here feels grounding. He understands. 

She doesn’t cry during the funeral mass. They sit side by side in perfect silence through the service, and when they move outside to bury him once and for all, she slips her small hand in his and keeps him close. Michael’s coffin is lowered and they both cry, squeezing each other’s hands like she’s never threatened to divorce Michael over him even _thinking_ Trevor’s name and as if he’d never spoken hers like it carried plague. 

The lack of Michael is painful, but in it, a tension slackens. 

They both go home. A few elderly churchgoers who don’t know her and didn’t know Michael come home with her, asking if she needs anything, and if she’ll be alright now that her children have left the nest and her husband is buried. She is strong, she says. The Lord walks with her. It’s what they want to hear.

When they go, she drinks. It would be wrong not to, she thinks, wrong to let Michael’s scotch grow older and lonelier in its dark corner. She lies on the couch and drinks and drinks and drinks while the news blares in the background, the earth turning in spite of her, without the knowledge that the only thing worth living through the seasons for had been reclaimed by it’s soil. 

The knock is so soft that at first, she thinks she imagines it, or mistook a bird flying into the window for human company. But quickly, knocking turns to banging and she pulls herself up onto her unsteady feet to see who the _fuck_ is interrupting her. She almost vomits. The world is spinning more than it used to. Or faster maybe. 

She stumbles when she goes to open the door, expecting Jimmy home with Franklin’s skull in his hands (just like his father, she thinks) or Tracey home from college, where she is drinking her hurt away (like her father, and her mother too). They have both turned their grief inwards, hidden it away where she can’t see it. Her children are running from her; slipping through her fingers before her eyes. 

But it’s not them. It’s Trevor, who has a few buttons undone and who smells like alcohol and burning plastic, teetering on her doorstep. Neither of them says anything. Amanda’s eyes well with tears, and she moves out of the way of the door. Trevor walks in, awkward and too tall in the foyer, still unsteady on his feet. They gaze at each other.

“I’m drinking.” Amanda says. Trevor frowns, cocking his head. “Do you, uh. Want something?” She means a drink, but she realizes that asking Trevor what he wants, especially right now, is setting them both up for a night full of tears and screaming. She frowns, too.

But Trevor doesn’t rise to the accidental bait; instead, he sighs, hard and long, and nods. He seems drained of his life, like he’s half in Michael’s grave with him. She glances at her own skin, pale with sleeplessness, and wonders if the coffin will fit three. 

She pours him a drink and hands it to him, but he doesn’t raise it to his lips. When she brushes past him to go back to the couch where she had been keeping her vigil, she catches the scent of Michael. Smoke. Michael’s cigarettes are in Trevor’s free hand. She stops dead, eyes shut, inhaling and telling herself that when she opens her eyes, Michael will be standing there.

He isn’t. It’s still Trevor, who is looking at her and holding his drink in his hand. She is so, so tired. 

“Drink.” She commands softly. He does. “I’m tired.” She says, and he looks away, just as confused as to his purpose here as she is. She takes the bottle from behind him and touches his wrist as slowly and gently as she can in this state, urging him to follow her as she goes towards the stairs. Her sheets still smell like Michael. She can bear to share this gift.

His boots are heavier on the stairs than Michael’s soft shoes and her own bare feet. Trevor has always been solid like that. Weighty like that. A necessary balance to her on the scale of Michael. She wishes she could tell Michael that now; that she was sorry, that she understood why Trevor was just as much a part of their marriage as their rings, that he was split down the middle and could only ever afford to give away half his heart and half his love at a time.

She abandons this trail of thought when she walks into her room. His shoes are still in the corner, his watch on the dresser. She feels like sobbing, so instead she goes to the bed and lies in it; face down with the bottle of scotch between the pillows like a baby. She hears Trevor remove his shoes slowly and methodically. She inhales. The bed dips and she offers Trevor the bottle, raising her head to watch him drink deeply.

They do that for a long while, passing the amber liquid back and forth and crying into the soft linen sheets. They are both miserable. They start to talk, eventually. Trevor tells her stories of drunken Michael falling off a first story balcony at a party before he met her, of charging in guns blazing to a fight that should have killed them and coming out the victors, of their time in Sandy Shores, singing classic rock hits together and staying up in their shared bed and whispering childish never have I evers to each others. 

She tells him stories, too. She tells him about Michael’s face the first time Tracey smiled at him. About before Tracey, when they both still did drugs and they got so high they couldn’t find the earring Amanda was wearing, about this house and how Michael had pushed her in the pool after the kids were in bed and they splashed each other and giggled and kissed like they were teenagers again.

They are very, very drunk.

“It should’a—you should’a—y’know, you two…” Amanda rolls onto her side and attempts to gently push Trevor’s chest, but ends up poking him with one shaky, sloppy finger instead. She can’t get the right words to come out of her mouth. Everything is spinning. Her tongue feels heavy. Luckily, Trevor seems to understand what she means.

“Wha’, me and? Uh? Michael?” He’s slurring too, she notices. The slow realization that Trevor is just as fucked up as she is is somehow funny to her. She giggles a little. Trevor plows on. “Nah, nah. He _loved_ you, y’know? He didn’t—he never loved me like that.” Amanda frowns, but Trevor seems unaffected by his observation. “And anyway, I’m, fuck, ‘m, ‘m, ‘m not a nice person, Mandy, okay? ‘M real bad. I didn’t—” Trevor hiccups. “didn’t deserve ‘im.” 

“Noooo!” Amanda coos, her clumsy hands going to Trevor’s chest again in an attempt to comfort him. “No, no, you’re not so baddd!” She insists. Trevor’s bottom lips quivers. “You’re—you’re,” She stops to giggle again at her invented word, “you’re fan-tidily-tastic.” She whispers. 

“Fan-tiddily-tastic?” Trevor whispers back, eyes wide and breath reeking of booze. Amanda nods, her palm still pressed flat to his chest. She can feel his heart thumping if she concentrates. 

She’s thinking about the pounding in Trevor’s chest, so she doesn’t realize he’s going to kiss her until he does it. She gasps, louder and more dramatically than she means to. She slides her hand up his thin chest and to his boney shoulder, bringing him closer in the clumsy way people do when they’re three fourths of the way into a bottle of scotch. They fumble together, all teeth and nose and awkward touches as they try to strip each other, encased in the smell of Michael and the only traces of him left in this world. 

He rolls on top of her and she lets him, her legs wrapped around his waist and both of their faces wet though neither of them are sure why. She clutches the back of his neck and he buries his face in the crook of her neck and the whisper comforts to each other that don’t make sense, and then he’s inside her and she’s sighing and they’re rocking together in the soft light coming through her windows from the streetlamps and neon and stars outside.

After, they fall asleep together and they wake up and drink and drink and talk and they fuck again. And again. She doesn’t mean to let it become a habit. It sounds strange, she knows, but in some way, sleeping with Trevor is some kind of apology. Giving him head is atonement. It is a message to her dead husband; a way of saying that if he were here right now, she would give him head, too. 

It’s not special or romantic or magical. They don’t fall in love. There is no great moment of forgiveness and understanding between them in which they find that they were meant to be lovers all along. They are still two bitter, angry, mourning people who have nothing save for replaying memories in the middle of the night.

It’s a small comfort, at least. They eventually part for brief times—sometimes only hours but sometimes for full weeks, almost forgetting the other exists until they need a place to rest their lonely. They drink together. Amanda smokes weed again with Trevor when the alcohol is too bitter. They’re looking for a picture that cannot be completed. 

It’s not fair to say that either of them hold a full half of the puzzle that was Michael Townley. There are likely spare pieces scattered across the country—there are other strippers and other drug dealers who hold singe pieces in their fists. Lester has a handful, she imagines. Brad likely carried two or three to his grave. She wonders how many fistfuls of memories and loving words Franklin holds in his traitorous throat. 

When Trevor is out of her sight, doing God knows what to God knows whom, she doesn’t worry about him. She doesn’t think of him at all, really. It’s just that they’re both perfectly aware that the other holds half of the man they loved, and deep down they both think that maybe if they press close enough to each other, they can get some piece of him back. No one in the world knows the bitter sting of building your life around Michael De Santa only to have him leave you for the grave better than they do. Trevor knows it better, even, than her.

She’s caught him at Michael’s grave once or twice; his tall shadow thrown across marble headstones as she crested the hill to their husband’s final resting place. She leaves him be when she can. She still has Michael’s shirts to cry in and his ring to wear. She allows Trevor his private grief. 

He told her once that having been through this before doesn’t make it easier. He wasted those precious few months being angry, angry, angry, and Michael is gone and it only makes it burn more, harder, darker than it did before. She asks cruelly if he holds their time playing house together in his trailer dear and he snarls and tells her that she’s still the little girl he remembers from back then, still petty and spoiled with no idea what it is to be a secret, a shame, to have given your very soul to someone who would sell it for a pack of Marlboros on a good day.

They never stop fighting. At least Trevor doesn’t have to settle into a new life, a new silence in his halls like she does. He has known and navigated the darkness, where she has only ever known the light. Sometimes she traces the tattoo on his arm like a map, hoping that the deep black lines there could guide her safely home.

She goes to mass again. She looks for the god she stopped loving a long time ago, wearing down beads and silver crosses with tears and kisses. She takes Trevor to her bed in darkness. Their morning star has gone out.


End file.
